Wednesday, May 28, 2008

While there is no “magic” formula for increasing conversions on comparison shopping sites, there are some steps merchants can take to improve the quality of the feed to impact their conversion rate:

Fill in as many fields as possible in each shopping engine- in the GoDataFeed system, you can hover over each field to view each engines detailed description/example

Titles and descriptions - make them clear, concise and accurate

Categorize products in the best location for each shopping site- GoDataFeed has all data feed categorizations built-in, so you can view which categories best fit your product lines

Customer Reviews can seriously affect conversions so make customer service a main priority

Price Matters- it may be a good idea to include tax and shipping on the comparison shopping engine so that the consumer knows the exact price once they click over

Check your Links- make sure your product and image URLs work properly -- check that the re-directs are valid, working links that link to the actual product page for the product clicked as opposed to a homepage

High quality images- it is important to give consumers a good idea of what the product actually is when the image is enlarged, prior to clicking over

Improve and optimize all relevant landing pages, especially for sale or holiday items

Increase Ranking of Best Sellers- increase your maximium bid slowly -one or two cents in the beginning- then monitor performance and see if it pays to bid higher.

Maintain Fresh feeds- While a customer might be pleasantly surprised if a lower price is returned following a click-through, conversions may decrease if a higher price is returned or worse yet, the product is unavailable.

Remove low performing products- GoDataFeed's Performance Analytics lets you monitor which products are selling and which are not-- use this feedback to exclude low-performing items.

Take advantage of each CSEs features-For example, PriceGrabber's offers dedicated Account Managers for every merchant and Become displays merchant logos free with each listing

The idea is to provide shoppers with as much relevant information as possible prior to the click-through, leading to a good user experience and a more qualified lead. GoDataFeed has all of the fields and categories built-in for each engine, so merchants can see descriptions and examples of each shopping site’s data feed requirements.

For this entry, we surveyed a handful of our supported engines, including PriceGrabber, Become and Jellyfish-- now known as "Cashback." According to the NY Times article "Microsoft Offers Rebates to Shoppers Using Its Search," the new program focuses on searches for products to be bought online, which Microsoft executives said account for roughly a third of search queries and a majority of search advertising revenue.